 | The Old Dominion |  |
III
COLONIAL LIFE
THE life of the Old Dominion was in a manner
distinctive, and that it was not more so
was due to the impress that it extended to the
life beyond its borders. It preserved far more
than that of the other colonies the traits of the
English country life, including the distinction of
different orders of society and their traditionary
habits of life and forms of government.
From the first the Virginia colonization was
under charge of the best element in the kingdom.
It had its inception in the great strategic
motive of wresting this continent from Spain
and making it English. The charter itself was
granted to men of rank and standing, like the
Gilberts and Raleigh, with whom were associated
men of the highest class, who gave it a
character which it never lost. Elizabeth's interest
in the movement gave it the catchet of the
court and the nobles and other gentry in Parliament
work so fraught with promise for England.
Raleigh boasted that he could number a hundred
gentlemen among his kindred, and the
great landowners took part in the movement
as "adventurers," adventuring for such merchandise,
as Romeo vowed he would for Juliet,
as far as was the farthest sea.
The first Virginia Councils were composed
almost entirely of men of title. The spirit of
adventure, which had brought Hawkins, Drake,
the Gilberts and others such honors and such
renown, drew the young gallants fresh from
their father's estates or from the wars in the Low
Countries. And the term "Gentleman," as
showing one of the arms-bearing class is constantly
found in the list of immigrants.
Captain John Smith, who had the good fortune
to become the best-known writer and historian
of the first colony, began by decrying the
class of gentlemen who had accompanied them,
and who being, certainly at first, not accustomed
to the laborious manual toil which fell to
their lot, without doubt gave much trouble to
their taskmasters. Yet, later on, he recorded
the significant fact that these gentlemen cut
down more trees than those who had been
brought up to labor. The Governor and the
class, and while the settlers were composed of
men of every class, the names of the gentry
predominate throughout the early years and
compose a large percentage throughout the
whole history of the colony. From the time
that Sir Walter Raleigh impressed his spirit on
the first explorers down to the time of Lord
Dunmore, her last Colonial Governor, it was
esteemed almost as essential that the Governor
of Virginia should be a man of rank as it is that
the Lord Lieutenants of Ireland or of Canada
or the Viceroy of India should be such to-day.
None but gentlemen were selected for the
Governorship or the Council, and to have been
a Councillor was in itself a proof of gentility.
But there was ever a tendency to transplant the
life of England as closely as might be to the
new country.
Much has been made in some quarters of the
shipment to Virginia at certain times of bodies
of convicts, and of a shipment of "chaste
maids" as wives for a class of the settlers who
paid for their passage. A number of such
shipments were made: "wild gallants" and
"dissolute persons" who followed the Court, or
unfortunate adherents to the cause of a Monmouth,
though the number who came over thus
thought some of the settlers, far too limited,
while the shipment of convicts was quickly
stopped on the protest of the Virginians. But
the introduction of these, like that of the indented
servants, who worked out their passage,
only served to widen the gap between them and
the gentry, and to emphasize the distinctive
aristocratic feature of Virginia society. The
exactions of the new life steadily wrought their
influence. Every man was a soldier on outpost
duty. Every woman was on frontier service.
Courage, force, endurance, constancy
were demanded day by day, and day by day
strengthened their fibre until a new people
began to come into being.
The breadth and freedom of the vast spaces
about them entered into their spirit, and from
the first, while they professed unbounded devotion
to their King and the Home Government,
they were instant in their jealous watchfulness
of their rights and privileges. Happily
for them, in their earliest charters, they had been
granted by Elizabeth, and later by James, the
rights, privileges and immunities of native-born
citizens of Great Britain to them and their
posterity, forever, and from the first protests of
Archer and Martin, and other members of the
Declaration of Independence, they, and their
posterity, appealed to and relied on these charters
of their liberties for the justice of their
action.
As the country developed, the grant of lands
in large tracts to gentlemen, on condition that
they should settle bodies of tenants on them,
served to foster class-distinctions, and the settlement
of separate plantations along the rivers
wholly isolated, and surrounded by deadly
enemies, created conditions somewhat feudal
in their form, the planter-employer engaging to
take care of his people and the latter binding
themselves to work for him and march with him
in any exigency demanding their service. Thus,
when grants were made like that to William
Byrd, of lands at the Falls of the James, the
condition would be that the grantee should settle
so many families on them and in time of danger
furnish so many fighting men. This was the
very form of feudalism. Whatever its shortcomings
were, its foundation was a duty owed
by every one to some one else. The introduction
of slaves and of the indented servants served
to establish the class-distinctions which already
existed, and while the exactions of life in a new
country offered opportunities to men of push
abilities enter the upper class, the history of the
colony shows that, having risen, they promptly
took to themselves titles, coats of arms and all
the insignia of such a class. But this class had
not only its privileges but its responsibilities.
The cultivation of tobacco early proved a
mine of wealth for the colony which no other
colony possessed, and the exemption of the
negroes from malaria made them among the
most valuable settlers.
The easiest and most secure means of intercommunication
were along the rivers, where the
fertile bottom-lands had in a generation or two,
after the cultivation of tobacco began, enriched
the landowners, and thus social life followed
these waterways, and the old colonial houses
along the James, the York, the Potomac, the
Rappahannock and their tributaries, which are
to-day among the most interesting relics of our
past history, marked the rise of families of
gentry, who for something like two hundred
years made marriage alliances among themselves,
and built up a landed gentry whose
history is one of the notable elements in the
civilization of the country and the race. Aristocratic
in its form, it contained the essential
principle of Republicanism. Every freeholder
luxury in the modern acceptation of the term.
The great landlord must be as hardy as his
hunter; the mistress of the plantation must be
as brave as her ancestress who defended her
castle or her grange.
Outside of the small class of students of the
history of that time little is known of the work
accomplished by this colony of Virginia and the
people who founded it. Historians themselves
have taken little account of the influence that
this plantation and the work of its founders
exerted in moulding anew the thought of the
English people in the direction of liberty. Yet
it was the necessity for a new form of government,
adapted to the needs of a wholly new system
of colonial existence, which brought the
changes in the charters granted by the Crown to
the people who undertook this settlement. The
Virginia courts became the talk of the English
People, and every session was thronged with
interested onlookers studying the new system
of government, until they came to be known as
the Virginia Parliaments," and the Spanish
Ambassador warned King James I. that his
Virginia courts "were but a Seminary for a
seditious Parliament"; and James, who was
desirous to secure an alliance by marriage with
granted under the Virginia charter.
Happily for Virginia and happily for the
world, by the time that King James felt himself
strong enough to attempt to suppress our
liberties they had become too firmly established
for his plan to be carried out. Sir Walter
Raleigh fell a victim; but the great country
which he had done so much to found, and of
which he had been the first and "Chief Governor,"
survived, and survived also the spirit
which he had done so much to create.
Virginia was Royalist, but she was Royalist
as Raleigh and Southampton and Sandys were
Royalists. And no Republican or Roundhead
was ever more jealous for his rights than were
her Royalist people.
By 1619 when the first General Assembly met,
"this people had got their reins of servitude
into their own swindge," and thenceforth directed
their own course. In 1624 the Virginia
Assembly passed a law providing that no taxes
should be levied or applied in Virginia but by
and with the consent of the Virginia Assembly.
And this was the very ground on which one
hundred and fifty years later the American
Revolution was based. From this time, during
this one hundred and fifty years, the continual
the Virginia colony and the product of its civilization,
for whether it was asserted in Virginia or
in New England, it was based on the principle
thus first enunciated and asserted by the Virginia
colony.
In 1642 they boldly declared "freedom of
trade to be the blood and life of a community."[1]
From this time the people were aroused, and
not many years later when one of their governors,
Sir John Harvey, failed to espouse as
warmly as they thought proper the cause of
William Claiborne, "the Rebel," in his war
with the Lord Proprietor of the new colony of
Maryland, they rose and "thrust him out of the
Government." This was the first Revolution
that actually took place on American soil.
When Charles II. was a fugitive before Cromwell,
the Virginians offered him a crown, and
when Cromwell, victorious in England, undertook
to trample on their rights, he found them
so stubborn in their opposition that the ships
he had sent to subdue them were fain to make
peace with them, almost as an independent
power. They withstood him to the point of
exacting, in 1652, what was in effect a treaty
with his commissioners: expressly stipulating
done, and reserving the right to levy all
taxes and make local laws; but they readily
assimilated the defeated Royalists who came
after Edge Hill and Worcester, and the exiled
Republicans who sought homes among the
planters after the Restoration.
When, later, Charles became King of England,
and, unmindful of the loyalty of his Virginia
subjects, undertook to grant the Northern Neck
to three of his Court favorites, the Virginians
flamed up so threateningly that the King was
forced to withdraw the grant.
Fifteen years later, when the Royal Governor
refused the planters on the frontier permission
to raise an army to defend themselves against
the Indians, they rallied behind young Nathaniel
Bacon, seized Jamestown, and forced from the
Governor and his adherents on the Council the
laws they demanded, and when, later, Sir William
Berkeley withdrew his consent and declared
them Rebels, they stormed and burnt the capital,
and Berkeley was forced to take refuge on the
Eastern Shore. Later, factions among the
Revolutionists and the illness of the leader,
Bacon, enabled Berkeley to recoup his loss; the
revolutionists were defeated and scattered, and
Berkeley hanged so many of them that King
more men in that naked country for his rebellion
than the King had hanged for the murder of his
father. But though the participants were defeated
and punished, the cause was not lost. The rights
still survived, as survived also the resolution to
claim them and make the claim good.
By this time up and down the broad rivers the
landed proprietors had their own wharfs and
their own ships to carry their produce to England,
and they throve and grew rich on it, notwithstanding
the trade-laws which hampered
their traffic. The records are full of their protests
against these regulations; protests against
import taxes; protests against the further importation
of slaves; protests against unequal
trade regulations.
In 1718 the penny-a-letter postage on letters
from England was resisted on the ground that
Parliament could not levy a tax without the
consent of the General Assembly.[2]
For Education the planters imported college-bred
teachers from home, as England was
called, or sent their children to England to be
educated there in the public schools and the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Old Sir William Berkeley is said to have
thanked God that in his day there were neither
free schools—that is, classical schools—nor
printing presses in the colony, and he trusted
there might not be for three hundred years.
But the declaration, if ever made by him, was
untrue in fact, for a free school had been established
in Elizabeth City County in 1634 by bequest
of Benjamin Symes: "the first legacy
made for that purpose by a resident of the
American plantations," and other free schools
followed in the benefactions of Virginia planters:
one in Gloucester County in 1675, founded
by Henry Plasiby, another in Yorktown in 1601,
founded by Gov. Nicholson; one in Westmoreland
County in 1700, by William Horton; one
in Accomack in 1710, by Samuel Sanford, and
one in Elizabeth City, by Thomas Eaton.[3]
Indeed, within twenty years from the removal
of Berkeley, the projected College of Henricus,
which had disappeared in the massacre of 1622,
had a successor which was to produce, possibly,
the most notable list of graduates that any institution
of learning has had in this country.
William and Mary College, founded in 1698, at
the new seat of government only a half dozen
point of time only to Harvard, became a veritable
factory of patriots. There the Grymeses, the
Byrds, the Blands, the Pages, the Harrisons, the
Lees, the Randolphs, and many others of the old
families of the colony secured the liberal education
which they put to such admirable use in the
days when the Rights of the colonies engrossed
all the energies of America, and overshadowed
all other discussion. There Thomas Jefferson
obtained the learning and developed the skill
which made him, as John Adams said, "the
most graceful pen in America," and thus led to
the young Virginian's drafting the Declaration
of Independence.
As the years progressed and the settlements
extended farther to the westward, other elements
came in: stout Scotch and Scotch-Irish
settlers poured into the western districts from
Scotland and North Ireland, particularly after
the various revolutions. A strong infusion of
Huguenot blood followed, and gave the Old
Dominion some of her most noted sons.
Thus, the population of the Old Dominion
was composed of sundry strains, all virile, and
as the race pushed westward they carried with
them the distinctive civilization which still
shows to-day along the lines they travelled,
southern Ohio, Missouri, and sections of many
other States, and materially affecting all of
them. For the civilization of the Old Dominion,
while naturally more clearly preserved within
her own borders, is not limited to her own long
shrunken confines. As the oldest, wealthiest, and
strongest colony, she, during the Colonial period,
most strongly influenced the life of all the colonies,
leading them finally in their action of breaking
the ties which bound them to the old country.
The Character of the Virginians was remarked
on by their fellow-members in the Colonial
Congress, which adopted the Declaration. "The
Virginia, and indeed, all the Southern delegates,"
wrote Silas Deane, "appear like men of importance.
. . . They are sociable, sensible and spirited
men." Not a milksop among them, was
the judgment of one who appeared to think that
some of the other delegations were not so free
from this charge.
Whatever the faults of the Virginians were
they were the faults of a virile and independent
race. Their virtues and their vices were those
of the corresponding English classes from which
they came, modified by the conditions which
surrounded them in the new country. Every
planter was to some extent a captain—a ruler
the qualities developed were those of a ruling
class. But there was a class which existed
far below this ruler-class also with virile traits
and clean-cut character. It was not dependency;
for they were in their poverty as independent
as their wealthier neighbors. Slavery
had not, as has so often been insisted, destroyed
the dignity of labor, so much as it had furnished
the laborers to perform most of the work. Thus,
there was not the call for labor that existed
in countries where the laborers were all free.
Those who in other countries or sections composed
the laboring class in the South were known
as "poor whites," but however poor they were
they retained their personal independence.
They despised all menial employment and lived
much as their ancestors had lived. Poor but
independent, they exhibited the traits of frontiersmen,
lovers of the woods; fond of fishing
and hunting, and often skilled woodsmen;
hospitable and kindly, pleasant in manner, firm
in friendship and fierce in enmity; ready to
follow the lead of the upper class; but stout
in their opinions when formed, and tenacious
of their rights.
Benjamin Harrison, the Signer, related how
the men of this class came to him and his colleagues,
at the outbreak of the Revolution, and told them
that they confided their interests to them and
would stand by them in whatever conclusion
they might reach. And the same thing occurred
at the outbreak of the Civil War.
They lived the life of Englishmen according
to their several orders, making due allowance
for the widely changed conditions amid which
they found themselves placed. Their amusements
were those which they had brought from
England to which they naturally added those of
a frontier life.
A picture of the life is contained in the old
Virginia Gazette, published at Williamsburg
about the year 1737, which represents the life
at that time in my native county of Hanover.
"We have" says the Gazette, "advices from
Hanover County that on St. Andrews Day there
are to be Horse-Races and several other Diversions
for the Entertainment of the Gentlemen and
Ladies at the Old Field near Capt. John Bickerton's
in that county (if permitted by the Honorable
William Byrd, Esquire, Proprietor of said
Land) the substance of which is as follows, viz.:
"It is proposed that 20 Horses and Mares
will run around a three mile Course for a purse
of Five Pounds.
"That a Hat of the value of 20 s. be cudgelled
for and that after the first challenge made the
Drums are to beat every Quarter of an hour for
three Challenges round the ring and none to
play with their left hand.
"That a Violin be played for by 20 fiddlers;
no person to have the liberty of playing unless he
bring a fiddle with him. After the prize is won
they are all to play together and each a different
tune and to be treated by the company.
"That 12 boys 12 years of age do run 112
yards for a Hat of the cost of 12 shillings.
"That a Flag be flying on said Day 30 feet
high.
"That a handsome Entertainment be provided
for the subscribers and their wives; and
such of them as are not so happy as to have
wives may treat any other lady.
"That Drums, Trumpets, Hautboys, etc., be
provided to play at said Entertainment.
"That after Dinner the Royal Health, his
Honor the Governor's, etc., are to be drunk.
"That a Quire of Ballads be sung for by a
number of Songsters, all of them to have Liquor
sufficient to clear their windpipes.
"That a pair of Silver Buckles be wrestled for
by a number of brisk young men.
"That a pair of handsome Shoes be danced for.
"That a handsome pair of Silk Stockings of
one pistole value be given to the handsomest
young Country Maid that appears in the field.
"With many other Whimsical and Comical
Diversions too numerous to mention. . . ."
When, towards the end of the third quarter
of the eighteenth century, the age-long conflict
which had gone on between the Government of
England and her colonies culminated in the
great Revolution which produced the American
nation, it might have appeared to the casual
observer, as it actually appeared to George the
Third, that the only hope of the people of those
colonies, stretched in a thin line along the
Atlantic seaboard, was in absolute and unqualified
submission. Their material interests
were in many ways conflicting; their historical
traditions were to some extent divergent; their
religion was somewhat different at least, as manifested
in their forms of worship. Indeed, in
the same colony the material interests and the
traditions of different classes of the inhabitants
differed. But they were unified by one principle
which was common to all the colonies and to
all the classes therein. Love of liberty and independence
of view, fostered by the experiences
of an almost wholly new method of life and
wholly new conditions had had its extraordinary
settlement.
Moreover, they were unified by their character.
From one end of the country to the other
the people arrayed themselves in defence of their
rights as freemen, throwing all other considerations
to the winds, so they might establish Liberty
in their country. But the Virginians led.
The Government and the Constitution under
which that government is exercised sprang from
the Character of our fathers. The tree of Liberty,
which has grown until it has come to shelter
almost the whole earth, had its roots in that
Character. But for their character the great
questions on which the Revolution was fought
out would never have arisen; but for their character
the Revolution would never have succeeded;
but for their character the surrender of
selfish advantages would never have taken place,
and the Union, under a Constitutional government,
based on such surrender for the good of
all, would never have been established.
| The Old Dominion | |